"Stolen Identity" (from San Jose Mercury News)

<hibbert@xanadu.com>Mon, 27 Jan 92 17:46:14 PST

There was an article in the San Jose Mercury News, 12 January 1992, titled
"Stolen Identity", that should be of interest to RISKS readers. It concerned a
woman who had numerous driving infractions charged to her because an
unscrupulous aquaintance was able to get away with supplying the woman's
driver's license instead of her own. Here's a summary:
One woman (Donna) lets another, down on her luck, (Billy) live in her apartment
for a few months till she gets back on her feet. Billy finds out Donna's
Drivers License number, and proceeds to give it any time she is stopped by the
police, which happens quite a lot. The police take Billy's word for her name,
and Donna is unwittingly saddled with tickets from Police Departments in
Oakland, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Jose as well as the CHP. Early in the
game, an officer may have allowed her to see the results of looking up the
license number in the databases accessible from the squad car. Donna has
tickets for speeding, expired registration, open containers of alcohol, going
through stoplights, failure to wear a seatbelt, and of course driving without a
license.
Donna has given up on fixing the problem, and has cancelled her license. Her
last hope is that some cop will arrest Billy for the more serious charge of
driving with a suspended license.
Chris

Unsafe artificial neural networks

Bill Armstrong <arms@cs.ualberta.ca>Mon, 27 Jan 1992 18:43:45 -0700

Here is an example of a backpropagation neural network that has very
wild behavior at some points not in the training or test sets. It has
just one input unit ( for variable x), two hidden units with a
sigmoidal squashing function, and one output unit.
This kind of subnetwork, a "neural net virus" if you like, may exist in many of
the networks that have been trained to date. It could be built into any large
BP network, and might hardly change the latter's output behavior at all --
except in one small region of the input space, where a totally unexpected
output could occur that might lead to disaster.
I hope this note will be taken as a warning by all persons whose ANS are used
in safety critical applications in medicine, engineering, the military etc. It
is also an encouragement to design safety into their neural networks.
In order to avoid details of the backpropagation algorithm, we shall just use
the property that once a BP net has reached an absolute minimum of error on the
training and test sets, its parameters are not changed. So our net will have
zero error by design and the BP algorithm, applied with infinite precision
arithmetic, would not change its weights. The issue of getting stuck at a
local minimum of error does not apply in this case, since it is an absolute
minimum.
All the weights in the system remain bounded, and in this case, the
bound on their absolute values is 40. The output unit's function is
40 * H1 + 40 * H2 - 40, where Hi is the output of the i-th hidden unit
(i = 1, 2). The output unit has no sigmoid, though one could be
inserted with no loss of generality. The two hidden units have
outputs of the form 1/(1 + e ^ (w0 + w1*x)) with w0 = -10 and w0 = 30,
while w1 = + 40 and -40, respectively.
We assume the net has been trained on a subset of integers and also tested on a
subset of integers. This could be replaced by a finer grid, and safety assured
(for bounded weights). However, in a d-dimensional input space with a
quantization to L levels of each variable, one would need L ^ d training and
test points, which can easily be an astronomically large number (e.g. 1000^10).
Hence it is not generally feasible to assure safety by testing.
Below is the overall function f(x) produced by the net, which is also the
specification of what it is *supposed* to do outside the interval (0,1). In
(0,1) the specification is to be less than 0.002 in absolute value.
f(x) = 40 [ 1/( 1 + e^40*(x - 1/4)) + 1/( 1 + e^-40*(x - 3/4)) -1 ]
The largest deviation of our trained network f(x) from 0 on all integers is
f(0) = f(1) = 0.0018...
So f is within 2/1000 of being 0 everywhere on our training and test sets. Can
we be satisfied with it? No! If we happen to give an input of x = 1/2, we get
f(1/2) = - 39.99...
The magnitude of this is over 22000 times larger than anything
appearing during training and testing, and is way out of spec.
Such unexpected values are likely to be very rare if a lot of testing has been
done on a trained net, but even then, the potential for disaster can still be
lurking in the system. Unless neural nets are *designed* to be safe, there may
be a serious risk involved in using them.
The objective of this note is *not* to say "neural nets are bad for safety
critical applications". On the contrary, I personally believe they can be made
as safe as any digital circuit, and a lot safer than programs. This might make
ANS the method of choice for safety-critical electronic applications, for
example in aircraft control systems.
But to achieve that goal, a design methodology must be used which is
*guaranteed* to lead to a safe network. Such a methodology can be based on
decomposition of the input space into parts where the function synthesized is
forced to be monotonic in each variable. For adaptive logic networks, this is
easy to achieve. The random walk technique for encoding real values used in
the atree release 2.0 software available by ftp is not appropriate for
enforcing monotonicity. Instead, thresholds should be used, which are
monotonic functions R -> {0,1}. By forcing monotonicity, one can assure that
no wild values can occur, since all values will be bounded by the values at
points examined during testing.
For BP networks, I am not sure a safe design methodology can be developed.
This is not because of the BP algorithm, per se, but rather because of the
architecture of multilayer networks with sigmoids: *all* weights are used in
computing *every* output (the effect of zero weights having been eliminated).
Every output is calculated using some negative and some positive weights,
giving very little hope of control over the values beyond the set of points
tested.
Prof. William W. Armstrong, Computing Science Dept., University of Alberta;
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2H1 Tel(403)492 2374 FAX 492 1071

<> Lufthansa (German Airlines) admits that AIRBUS has advised all the
<> companies using the A320 to avoid THIS landing manoeuvre...
Given the description of the local geography, it sounds like this either means
you use this landing maneuver (guess which side of the pond I'm from :-), or
you don't land A320's at Strasbourg. Is this a RISK of bugs in flight software
affecting seemingly unrelated things, such as airline equipment schedules?
Marc

Re: A320 crash

The localization of "pilot error" in "the hiatus between the pilot and the
computer" is a more solidly persuasive notion than the slick equivocation
of the phrase might suggest.
As I understand it, control of the A320 is mediated by flight control computers
differently in one dimension (the vertical) than in the other two. Why is this
the case? Is particularly different status given to altitude, in terms of
attentional demands on pilots, compared to the aircraft's motion in the other
two dimensions? Or, must A320 pilots attend to and control altitude in a
manner different from what is for them either customary or sensible?
Re the overall FBW design, if pilots circumvent, push the limits of, tweak or
otherwise attempt to assert as much direct control over the aircraft as
possible, working against the "hard," "soft" or whatever degree of automated
mediation imposed by the computers, the problem is one caused not by pilot or
aircraft as such, but by the designers.
Germane to this, in cognitive psychologist Don Norman's (1988) The Design of
Everyday Things (aka The Psychology of Everyday Things), he writes:
Aircraft designers started using meters that looked like clockfaces
to represent altitude. As airplanes were able to fly higher and
higher, the meters needed more hands. Guess what? Pilots made
errors- serious errors. Multihanded analog altimeters have been
largely abandoned in favor of digital ones because of the prevalence
of reading errors. Even so, many contemporary altimeters maintain
a mixed mode; information about rate and direction of altitude change
is determined from a single analog hand, while precise judgments of
height come from the digital display.
Some relevant questions about the A320 flight deck should be obvious. Norman
continues:
Automation has its virtues, but automation is dangerous when it
takes too much control from the user. "Overautomation"- too
great a degree of automation- has become a technical term in the
study of automated aircraft and factories. One problem is that
overreliance on automated equipment can eliminate a person's
ability to function without it, a prescription for disaster if,
for example, one of the highly automated mechanisms of an
aircraft suddenly fails. A second problem is that a system may
not always do things exactly the way we would like, but we are
forced to accept what happens because it is too difficult (or
impossible) to change the operation. A third problem is that
the person becomes a servant of the system, no longer able to
control or influence what is happening....
All systems have several layers of control.... Sometimes we
really want to maintain control at a lower level... At other
times we want to concentrate on higher level things....
So the question is, what is the level of control that is appropriately accorded
aircraft pilots, based upon how humans think, on how pilots actually behave?
Relevant references from Norman's biliography list might also be:
Hurst, R. & Hurst, L.R. (Eds.) (1982). Pilot Error: The human factors.
London: Granada.
Weiner, E.L. (1980). Mid-air collisions: The accidents, the systems and the
realpolitik. Human Factors, 22, 521 - 533. Reprinted in Hurst &
Hurst.
Weiner, E.L. (1986) Fallible humans and vulnerable systems: Lessons learned
from aviation. (To be published in Informations Systems: Failure
analysis. Proceedings of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on
Failure Analysis of Information Systems.)
Weiner, E.L., & Curry, R.E. (1980). Flight-deck automation: Promises and
problems. Ergonomics, 23, 995 - 1011. Reprinted in Hurst & Hurst.
Christopher Ritter, Education in Math, Science and Technology Program
School of Education, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94530

Speculation on latest A-320 crash: why?

Joel Upchurch <joel@peora.sdc.ccur.com>Mon, 27 Jan 1992 07:56:05 GMT

I have a much simpler theory for why the A-320 has had so many crashes so far.
My experience is that the fewer number of events that have to occur to cause a
particular error the more likely that error is to occur. It seems to me that if
the pilot makes an error that isn't immediately fatal, then most of the time
the co-pilot is going to catch the mistake before it is fatal. Let us say that
the co-pilot catches 90% of the pilot's mistakes. So one time out of ten the
co-pilot misses the pilot's mistake and the plane crashs. Let us assume that in
a plane with a three man crew that the flight engineer also will catch the
pilot's mistake 90% percent of the time. It seems to me that the chance that
both of them would miss the error would only be 1%, that is the rest of the
flight crew would catch the pilot's error 99 times out of 100. Now I know this
is a gross oversimplification and the actual ratios are wrong, but
qualitatively the idea feels right. There is just one less pair of eyes and
ears in the cockpit to notice that something is wrong.
One thing that might support this is to study the relative accident rates of
large airlines that would generally have three crew members, commuter airlines
that would probably have two and air taxis and general aviation, that would
probably only have one pilot. The difference might not entirely be due to the
difference in the experience of the pilots. It might be informative to compare
the A-320 accident rates to other planes that have a two man crew, rather than
comparing it to planes of similar size that use a three man crew.
Also has anyone ever broken aircraft accident rates down to the rate per
landing and takeoff? It seems to me that might be more informative than
aircraft-hours or aircraft-miles.
Joel Upchurch/Upchurch Computer Consulting/718 Galsworthy/Orlando, FL 32809
joel@peora.ccur.com {uiucuxc,hoptoad,petsd,ucf-cs}!peora!joel (407) 859-0982

I am a great admirer of the A320, and, while I am not a pilot, I enjoy
a similar level of automation when navigating the 35' sailboat I race on every
summer. The equipment I use works extremely well, but if you punch in the
wrong numbers it will take you to the wrong place just as fast as it would to
the correct one. Although double and triple checking your work and monitoring
the progress of your vessel should always be done, the technology for "getting
you there" has greatly outstripped the technology for "telling you where you
are, and where you are going", i.e., situational awareness.
Although you can easily read latitude, longitude, altitude and airspeed
from your instruments, the method for relating this to possible hazards to
navigation is still primarily a manual one. Now that pilots are becoming
"system managers", they need to have the tools to monitor the system as a
whole, not just the hydraulic and mechanical subsystems. Simple ways to
improve upon this might include a vertical profile display on one of the
cockpit CRTs that plots both the programmed flight path of the aircraft and the
altitude of the ground from zero to five minutes into the future, and a moving
map display that also shows the predicted flight path. I know that on the boat
I race on I would dearly love to have the Trimble moving map display that does
this, it would significantly reduce my workload.
Scott (traurig@ncavax.decnet.lockheed.com)

Re: the Airbus crash

Jerry Bakin <JERRY@INNOSOFT.COM>Sun, 26 Jan 1992 21:09 PST

Regarding the Airbus crash. It has been noted that altitude is the one
parameter the pilots cannot program in.
Altitude maybe the most important parameter. Perhaps it is better that the
pilot-programmers program in altitude and let the computer derive the rest of
the information. The question may be which piece of data is crucial to the
problem and which is an artifact of antique technologies and obsolete methods.
If I were specifying a fly-by-computer system, I would certainly require a
database of all relevant altitudes (elevation at 100 foot intervals, airports,
minimum operating altitudes, etc).
Certainly with today's INS and GPS Systems, there is no more reason for a
computer controlled plane to fly into the ground then for a cruise missile to
overfly its target. Say how much software does the Airbus and the Exocet
share?
Jerry Bakin. Jerry@Innosoft.COM

DNA Dogtags - followup

David States <states@artemis.nlm.nih.gov>Fri, 24 Jan 92 03:26:11 GMT

Some followup on the earlier posting I made regarding the U.S. Army's proposal
to use "DNA dog tags" to build a database of soldiers genotype's as a universal
identification resource.
The New York Times (Jan. 12, pp. 15 "Genetic Records to Be Kept on Members of
Military") reports that the Army will go forward with the idea incorporating a
number of protections for the genetic privacy of soldiers. First, they will
only collect DNA samples (blood spots), but they will not genotype them unless
there is an actual need. Second, these samples will be destroyed when the
individual leaves the military. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these
samples will be treated as "medical specimen with confidentiality and respect,"
so they would not be available for testing for other purposes unless subpoenaed
by court order.
The net effect of these protections is about as much as could be hoped for.
The military will be able to use a valuable new technology in identifying the
remains of soldiers, and they will be able to do this without creating a
massive electronic database of genotype data.
Meanwhile, the British journal Nature reports an anecdote which illustrates
some of the pitfalls and prejudices of dealing with genetic data, "Challenge to
British forensic database" Nature, vol. 355, p.191. Since you can't change
your genes, the data in a genotype database will never go out of date, right?
Well it appears that is what the Metropolitan Police believed. Scotland Yard
has been building a database of genotypes from all the DNA samples they have
analyzed in the course of various criminal investigations. The problem is that
when a man cleared of all charges on the basis of a DNA analysis asked to have
his profile removed from the database, they found it necessary to "call in a
computer specialist." It seems that in designing the database, no one had
considered the possibility that you might want to delete an entry.
David States, National Library of Medicine

If the printer was a SCSI Printer, it could do the following :-
1) Change from Target mode to Initiator mode.
Most SCSI controllers support both initiator and target modes.
2) Interrogate each device on the bus to find the boot disk.
It may choose not to select ID 7 as this is probably the host ID.
3) Write the virus directly to the boot disk (or indeed any other disk).
Some SCSI devices can even have their firmware downloaded across the SCSI
Bus. A rogue program could download a virus that infects the disk as
described above. Therefore the O/S ought to prevent direct low level
access by user software to any SCSI device!
The company I work for does not make printers.
Paul Fellows, Inmos Limited, 1000 Aztec West, Almondsbury, Bristol, BS12 4SQ,
UK. uunet!inmos.com!paulf EMail(UK) ukc!inmos!paulf

So, could we please stop the discussion right here? I mean, we got two sides:
"Well, assuming 1,2,3 and 4 it might very well be possible for a printer to
spread a virus throuh a network"
"Nah, never. Printers are used to print stuff. The programs in printers would
never be able to do such a thing"
Regardless of who is right, maybe the discussion should focus on a way to make
sure that 1 2 3 and 4 do not occur anytime. To me it seems very unlikely that
such a thing occured in the Gulf war. But maybe, just maybe, someone got the
idea, and has just now finished his first compile.....
So the real RISKS in my opinion is not "has it happened" but "what will be the
consequences when it does happen".
I'm already giving my printer strange looks every time my job doesn't come
out as I want it to be :-)
--Ralph Moonen, rmoonen@hvlpa.att.com

Military uses for viruses

Don Tyzuk <841613t@aucs.acadiau.ca>Sun, 26 Jan 1992 12:44:25 GMT

About the military uses for viruses:
To ensure defeat of the enemy, a military commander will use every weapon at
his disposal, to exploit all weaknesses. The computer systems that are
necessary to operate an air defence network are obviously a weak link.
If the lives of Allied aircrew can be saved by a computer virus, then that
option would appear very attractive to the Commander in Chief.
Anyone reading this can believe that maximum effort was made to to exploit all
weaknesses.
Donald Tyzuk, P.O. Box 1406,
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, CANADA B0P 1X0 +1 902 542 7215

Re: "Desert Storm" viral myths

Flint Pellett <flint@gistdev.gist.com>27 Jan 92 22:18:54 GMT

If the NSA got ahold of a piece of hardware that was going to be used in an
Iraqi computer network that was supposedly secure, I would expect that there
are lots of things they could do with it that would be far more helpful to us
or damaging to them than messing around with a virus, and a lot easier to do
besides. For example, a printer connected to a network could be set up to
broadcast everything coming across the network in some fashion, or for that
matter it might glean info merely by broadcasting any talking it picked up near
the printer.
Flint Pellett, Global Information Systems Technology, Inc., 100 Trade Centre
Drive, Suite 301, Champaign, IL 61820 (217) 352-1165 uunet!gistdev!flint

Re: Viruses & printers

Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>28 Jan 92 18:10:37 GMT

Well, as so many other people are indulging in speculation, I might as well
join in. :-)
First, we should consider some things about the likely target of such an
attack, if it happened. First, it is unlikely that the system involved was a
general-purpose system with programs out on disk that could be run, one at a
time. It is also doubtful there was any such thing as a peer printer on a
network link.
Why do I say that? Because the alleged system was for air defense. This means
it was a system with a strong real-time component. In general, systems such as
this are built on older, more stable hardware and involve an embedded system --
not a disk full of utility programs like your favorite Unix or VMS time-share
environment.
The idea of a virus in such a system is ludicrous. Viruses don't work in
embedded systems. That, coupled with the general press's inability to tell a
virus from a spreadsheet, leads me to believe it certainly wasn't a virus, if
it was anything.
However, if we care to speculate a bit further, consider the possibiity of a
small Trojan horse being built into the air defense software by the original
contractor. Now imagine that a printer is brought in to the system that has a
small radio receiver involved, so that when a certain coded signal is received,
the printer uses a timing channel to signal the trojan in the printer driver
that it is time to disrupt operations. This is particularly easy in an
embedded, real-time system. Suddenly add a 5-second delay loop, for instance.
This is certainly within the realm of possibility. Furthermore, it would be
harder to detect under test (timing channels are notoriously difficult to find,
but are well-suited for certain real-time systems) without actual source code,
and it would not have the same hit-or-miss qualities of a virus. (Even source
code might not help, if we keep Thompson's little cc/login escapade in mind.)
April Fool's joke or not, don't believe the press when they say "virus" — but
don't automatically believe they don't have a story underneath the mistakes,
either!
Gene Spafford, NSF/Purdue/U of Florida Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-1398

Re: A Tale of Risk Avoidance [so far ...]

<mmm@cup.portal.com>Fri, 24 Jan 92 00:38:30 PST

"Kai-Mikael J\d\d-Aro" <kai@nada.kth.se> says in RISKS DIGEST 13.05:
> Perhaps the moral can be stated as: When Formal Methods Are Fun And Simplify
> Your Work, Then You Will Also Want To Use Them.
This might not be an unmitigated success, from the RISKS point-of-view. For
example, when the transition occurred from assembly language to compiled
languages, people found they could solve their old problems more easily. They
could say a + b = c without even knowing the address of a, b, and c.
The problem is that compiler technology (known in the old days as "automatic
programming") gave the individual programmer more reach. It allowed him to
attack problems beyond his mental grasp in the pre-compiler era.
Tools will always be pushed to their limit, because the limit is actually in
the programmer and it is the fundamental nature of programmers — like athletes
-- to go as far as they are capable, and try to go a bit farther. The tool
simply provides an amplification, like giving a pole-vaulter a longer pole.
The RISK is that the new tool allows the programmer to do more damage than
before.
Will Kai-Mikael J\d\d-Aro find himself next year creating state diagrams with
the complexity of a street map of Stockholm with 100 pucks circulating around
it? This might open a whole new range of computer applications (like, say, an
automatic vehicle control system for the streets of Stockholm), but there is no
particular reason to believe these systems will be more reliable than the
smaller systems built before the tool was developed. The RISK is that these
larger and more complex applications will cause more damage when they fail.
Mark Thorson (mmm@cup.portal.com)

Backup Systems and Marginal Conditions

Mike Bell <mb@sparrms.ists.ca>Thu, 23 Jan 92 09:34:51 EST

A snowstorm here in Toronto last week caused a "brownout" that revealed an
interesting failing in our emergency lighting system.
The emergency lighting is supplied by boxes containing batteries with a pair of
spotlights mounted on top. These are plugged into sockets around the building.
The idea is that if the mains supply fails, the lights will turn on.
When the mains supply voltage dropped, most of the fluorescent lighting failed.
However, the drop was insufficient to trigger the emergency lighting, which
remained (mostly) off. Fortunately the units could be unplugged to trigger the
lighting.
Also of note was a PC, which failed to detect the power problems and continued
operation when the rest of the computers shut down. I'm not sure if this was an
advantage (doesn't lose your work in the event of a brownout) or a disadvantage
(doesn't react to power problems which may damage the computer).

Risky Warranties

The Polymath <hollombe@soldev.tti.com>Fri, 24 Jan 92 14:47:38 PST

Here's a risk from the software industry that seems to have bled into other
areas with the help of no less than our own Federal Government.
We've all heard, joked and complained about — and suffered with — software
warranties that do far more to protect the vendor than the buyer. Loosely,
they can be summed up as saying 'We warranty that there are recoverable bits on
this disk. Beyond that, you're on your own.'
I recently made some substantial (~$1300) purchases of a couple of non-computer
products. Imagine my feelings at finding the following familiar seeming words
on the backs of the associated user's manuals (manufacturers and products have
been concealed to protect the guilty):
WHY NO WARRANTY CARD HAS BEEN
PACKED WITH THIS NEW <manufacturer> <product>
The Magnuson-Moss Act (Public Law 93-637) does not require any seller
or manufacturer of a consumer product to give a written warranty. It
does provide that if a written warranty is given, it must be
designated as "limited" or as "full" and sets minimum standards for a
"full" warranty.
<manufacturer> has elected not to provide any written warranty either
"limited" or "full", rather than to attempt to comply with the
provisions of the Magnuson-Moss Act and the regulations issued
thereunder.
There are certain implied warranties under state law with respect to
sales of consumer goods. As the extent and interpretation of these
implied warranties varies from state to state, you should refer to
your state statutes.
<manufacturer> wishes to assure its customers of its continued
interest in providing service to owners of